Word: aldous
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Frightened ethicists often tout Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" as a nightmarish blueprint of where science could lead us. Huxley envisioned a world of factory-produced human beings, engineered and brainwashed to fill society's different needs...
...result has been a relentless stream of outrageous books, movies and television shows, beginning with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published 61 years ago, and continuing through the summer's box-office behemoth, Jurassic Park. There are mysteries, thrillers, love stories -- even a sci-fi parody of an old pop song ("Weird Al" Yankovic's I Think I'm a Clone Now, sung to the tune of Tommy James and the Shondells' I Think We're Alone Now). Cloning, in fact, has been a fertile enough subject to earn its own lengthy entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction...
...discovery in World War I that scientific advances had also produced better engines of death and destruction turned speculation about the future excessively sour. Bellamy's radiant city became the high-tech slave societies of Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We and Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis. Aldous Huxley perfected the notion of dystopia in 1932 with Brave New World, and George Orwell weighed in with his haunting classic...
...popularity of having children and the evaporation of the time families spend together, another way may eventually evolve. It may be quicker and more efficient to dispense with family-based reproduction. Society could then produce its future generations in institutions that might resemble the state-sponsored baby hatcheries in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. People of any age or marital status could submit their genetic material, pay a fee, perhaps apply for a permit and then produce offspring. "Embryos could be brought to fetal and infant stage all in the laboratory, outside the womb," says Cornish. "Once ready...
Similar things had happened before: antiwar certitude (Harvard students' in 1940 booing any suggestion of saving Europe after the fall of France), literate radicalism (John Milton in the 17th century), public nudity (15th century Adamite Christians on islands in the Elbe), and drug advocacy (Aldous Huxley extolling the joys of mescaline in 1954). The generation of 1968 -- the first baby boomers -- may have been innocent of historical memory, but that did not bother them. What was important was that they felt new and different and, man, it was us vs. them, young vs. old, hip vs. square, revolutionaries against...